Transforming PET imaging with silicon
Fuzionaire Diagnostics can add Si–18F radiolabels to a variety of molecules quickly, easily and cheaply
Several years ago, Anton Toutov was a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, US, working in the lab of Nobel prize-winning chemist Robert Grubbs. He and a colleague discovered they could make carbon–silicon bonds with a safe and inexpensive potassium catalyst. This ability to make silicon-containing organic molecules without using rare and expensive precious metal catalysts is the basis for a new spin-out company, Fuzionaire Diagnostics, based in California.
The firm’s initial goal is to use potassium catalysis to make positron emission tomography (PET) radiotracers that can diagnose and image a wide variety of diseases, and accelerate drug discovery.